lingua franca 333
three European travelers describing three different parts of the Arabic-speaking
world each produced a fairly detailed description of the language. François Savary
de Brèves was the French consul to Constantinople, and his aide Jacques du Castel
wrote an account of his journey to Tunis in 1604 to sort out some difficulties that
had arisen with the corsairs there. In describing Tripoli (in the east) he includes an
account of the lingua franca, which he calls “Italian, but a corrupt speech, or more
precisely a jargon” (“Italien, mais un parler corroumpu, ou pour mieux dire un iar-
gon”; Savary de Brèves, 1628: 39).^3 Antonio de Sosa—a Portuguese traveler taken
captive and held in the bagnio in Algiers from 1577 until 1581—mentioned the
language among those current in Algiers and recorded a number of comments in
the lingua franca in a Spanish-language memoir published posthumously in 1612.
He refers to it as “what the Moors and Turks call franca, or hablar franco.”^4 And
Pietro della Valle described the lingua franca in a letter that he wrote about his visit
to Damascus in 1616; he called it “Italian—that is, that bastard Italian ... which in
these parts of the Orient they call franco piccolo” (Della Valle, 1843: 1:320). These
early witnesses to the language disagree about what to call it. But the language they
describe in each case is the same: a simplified form of Romance used to communi-
cate between speakers of diverse languages in the bagnios of the Barbary Republics
and the markets of the Levant.
None of these early descriptions give us enough detail to allow us to reconstruct
the language. Of the early sources, I cite Savary’s, because it is the most succinct and
detailed of the three, and because it is much less often cited than Sosa’s:
[I]l est bien composé de termes Italiens, mais sans liaison, sans ordre, ny syntaxe, ne
gardant és noms la concordance des genres, meslans les masculins avec les feminins, & ne
prenant des verbes, que les infinitifs, pour tous temps & personnes, avec les pronoms, mi,
& ti : neantmoins on les entend aussi bien que s’ils y observoient toutes les reigles de
grammaire, & faut que ceux qui ont affaire avec eux, en usent de mesme, s’ils veulent
estre entendus. (Savary de Brèves, 1628: 39)(It is composed of Italian words, but without connection, order, or syntax; not respect-
ing, in the case of nouns, the agreement of gender, but mixing masculine with feminine;
and using only the infinitive of the verb for all tenses and persons, with the pronouns
“mi” and “ti”; nevertheless they are understood just as well as if they observed all the
rules of grammar, and it is necessary that those who do business with them use the same
(language), if they wish to be understood.)Early descriptions largely concur with Savary’s—the lingua franca consisted of nouns
without markers of gender or number and infinitives without the terminations that
designate tense, mood, voice and person—although they are not always so frank in
describing it as simplified Italian. As we have seen, Pietro della Valle also calls it
Italian. But Sosa refers to it as “a mixture of various Christian languages, largely
Italian and Spanish words with some recently added Portuguese terms, since a great
number of Portuguese captives were brought to Algiers from Tétouan and Fès after
the king of Portugal, Don Sebastian, lost the battle in Morocco” (Sosa, 2011: 185).
Sosa was, naturally, more sensitive to the Portuguese words which have entered the
language recently, because he himself came from Portugal and was (one assumes) a
native speaker of Portuguese. Here he describes the effect that linguists would call